European Union starts project about economic effects of open government data

Earlier this week I talked to writer and open source advocate Marco Fioretti, who has just announced the start of a study on open data for the European Union. Fioretti is a long-time supporter of open source software, which he wrote about in a chapter of the O'Reilly book Open Government. Fioretti also held a seminar about open and prorietary formats at Pisa's Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, a major European college in the field of economics.

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Here come the healthcare apps

A look at the applications -- and the big opportunities -- showcased at the Community Health Data Forum.

"People in communities can improve their healthcare if they just have the information to do it," said Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), at the Community Health Data Forum in D.C. last week.

The forum took place almost exactly a decade after President Clinton announced he would unscramble global positioning system data (GPS) for civilian use. Now, the potential for private enterprise to provision services using open data from the Community Health Data Initiative could match the billions of dollars made when the government unlocked GPS and NOAA weather data. Last week, in fact, I wrote about how HHS is making community health information as useful as weather data.

Sebelius delivered her remarks to both an online audience at HHS.gov/open and the collection of government officials, technologists and researchers gathered at the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Science. Her speech is embedded below.

After the jump, learn more about the healthcare apps that were featured at the forum's showcase.

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Four short links: 11 June 2010

Delicious Absolution, Open Data Incentives, Curious iPad, and Desktop Web Apps Again

1. Joshua at Seven on Seven -- Delicious creator Joshua Schachter participated in a Rhizome "Seven on Seven" recently. He was paired with artist Monica Narula and together they explored guilt and absolution with the help of the Mechanical Turk. Check out the presentation PDF for the quick summary.
2. How to Align Researcher Incentives with Outcomes (Cameron Neylon) -- the open science data movement battles entrenched forces for closedness. We need more sophisticated motivators than blunt policy instruments, so we arrive at metrics. [...] What might the metrics we would like to see look like? I would suggest that they should focus on what we want to see happen. We want return on the public investment, we want value for money, but above all we want to maximise the opportunity for research outputs to be used and to be useful. We want to optimise the usability and re-usability of research outputs and we want to encourage researchers to do that optimisation. Thus if our metrics are metrics of use we can drive behaviour in the right direction. It sounds good, but I have one question: I remember The Rise of Crowd Science. Alex Szalay didn't have to change researcher incentives to promote shared astronomical data. I'd ask: what can the other sciences learn from astronomy?
3. Making an iPad HTML5 App and Making it Really Fast (Thomas Fuchs) -- some curious hard-won facts about iPad web development, like that touch events are delivered faster than click events. (via Webstock newsletter)
4. Appcelerator -- open source platform for building native mobile and desktop apps with web technologies. Local filesystem access and native controls, but built with HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, Python, and Ruby. OS X, Linux, Blackberry, iPad, .... I've not tried it, but it may be the variation on desktop web apps whose time has come. (via ptorrsmith on Twitter)

Can privacy, social media and business get along?

Tamar Weinberg on how shifts in privacy help and hinder social media.

Facebook's recent privacy moves -- and the company's response to the ensuing criticism -- plug in to much larger issues. Specifically, the changing perspectives on privacy and the give-and-take between user data and online services.

The implications from these bigger shifts extend beyond individual users. Many companies now rely on social media, so there are business-level repercussions at play here as well.

I got in touch with Tamar Weinberg, author of "The New Community Rules," to explore these various threads. In the following Q&A;, she discusses Facebook's position in the privacy world and she looks at how broader privacy changes affect consumers and businesses alike.

What's your take on Facebook's relationship with privacy?

Tamar Weinberg: Facebook likes to think it can get away with everything. A lot of the time, it can. I don't think the privacy move was a good one, though. Just recently, I was viewing a friend's profile where she said that one of her favorite activities was "being Abigail's mom." This activity was now clickable and turned into one of Facebook's Community Pages, which are public wikis. I noticed that there was another mother, unrelated to the first, who also had a similar activity. Furthermore, the page itself had a status update from a third mother who was also a mother to an Abigail. This is private information that now becomes public, and quite frankly, it's creepy.

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Four short links: 10 June 2010

Adventures in Digitization, DIY on TV, Copywrongs, and Web Testing

1. Gallery: Digitizing the Past and Present at the Library of Congress (BoingBoing) -- amazing pictures and stories about preserving and protecting the Library of Congress, it's papery past and its pixellated future. We can't afford any damage to anything," said Eric Hansen, chief of the Preservation Research and Testing Division. "Never take a sample; be completely nondestructive. ... We know there will be advances in technology and that current techniques will become outmoded."
2. Mark Frauenfelder on The Colbert Report -- It's great to see Make and DIY culture getting an articulate outing on national television, but I'm entranced by the useless device. Its motion is so emotionally evocative, I'd swear it exhibits shyness. Reminded me of EJ Park's work.
3. Copyright Elephant in the Middle of Glee -- if the TV show Glee were real life, the characters would have racked up millions on penalties from their infringing actions. In one recent episode, the AV Club helps cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester film a near-exact copy of Madonna’s Vogue music video (the real-life fine for copying Madonna’s original? up to $150,000). Just a few episodes later, a video of Sue dancing to Olivia Newton-John’s 1981 hit Physical is posted online (damages for recording the entirety of Physical on Sue’s camcorder: up to $300,000). And let’s not forget the glee club’s many mash-ups — songs created by mixing together two other musical pieces. Each mash-up is a “preparation of a derivative work” of the original two songs’ compositions - an action for which there is no compulsory license available, meaning (in plain English) that if the Glee kids were a real group of teenagers, they could not feasibly ask for — or hope to get — the copyright permissions they would need to make their songs, and their actions, legal under copyright law. Punishment for making each mash-up? Up to another $150,000 — times two.
4. Sikuli -- a visual technology to search and automate graphical user interfaces (GUI) using images (screenshots). (via liza on Twitter)

Streamlining craft in digital video

I ran across an article this morning in the New York Times about The 48 Hour Film Project. I thought it was cool and it got me thinking about how a digital workflow makes filmmaking so much more accessible -- even before the new iPhone puts iMovie in our palms.

In short, the 48 Hour crew comes to your town and runs a contest that gives you two days to complete a four- to seven-minute film from script to screen. Some of the films are surprisingly watchable and engaging in a DIY-meets-media-culture kind of way.

I'm a still photographer but I occasional dabble in film and video. Before it died under the weight of the digital avalanche, I used to subscribe to a magazine for 8mm filmmakers called "Small Film" (I think the German version still exists but I can't find the link at the moment). It regularly featured filmmaking contests like "make a super 8 film with only in-camera cuts" or "make a film with a budget of $x." They could have never run a contest that lasted only 48 hours though. It simply wouldn't have been possible with a film-based work flow.

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Cloud computing saves L.A. millions in IT costs

Los Angeles CTO Randi Levin on why her city moved into Google's cloud.

Why did the City of Angels move to the cloud? Given that the Los Angeles city budget was constrained by the Great Recession, the driver was simple: cost savings. When the reality of a legacy IT infrastructure that couldn't meet the needs of an increasingly mobile workforce was added to that driver, LA's chief technology officer Randi Levin put out a request for proposal for the cloud.

"We've been cutting services," she said. "We are now completely in what I would call 'survival mode.' Two or three years ago, we had a $116 million expense budget. Next year, it'll be $80 million. It might even be less."

After due diligence, Levin said her team recommended that the City of Los Angeles implement Google. "We predicted -- and are on track -- to save about $5 million over the next three years," said Levin. "Those are hard dollar savings."

Levin is looking ahead to where she can best use her staff. What are the important tasks? "It's not running servers," said Levin. "The city will get much more bang for their buck if we're developing applications and websites, or making processes more efficient. As a general rule, we're going to start moving out of that business and letting somebody else do it who can do it more efficiently."

Tim O'Reilly talked with Levin at the recent Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington, D.C. Their discussion is embedded below:

After the jump, read more about Los Angeles' decision to move into Google's cloud.

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Four short links: 9 June 2010

DIY Games, Code Review, Open Oil Data, Crowd Sourced Science Success

1. Game Dev 101 lessons with WarioWare DIY -- Nintendo's long-running and (at its debut) groundbreaking WarioWare franchise has always been predicated on discrete games played for 5-10 seconds at a time, in rapid succession, and it's precisely that stripped-bare approach that makes it an ideal launchpad for re-wiring the way aspiring designers think about what makes games fun. With its own bespoke image and music editor, a graphical scripting language not altogether (so I'm told) that different from the tools available in popular PC package GameMaker, and -- crucially, if a bit over-long for those more familiar with game dev proper -- hours worth of mandatory tutorials that leisurely stroll you through Your First Animated Sprite or Your First Logic Gate. (via BoingBoing)
2. What Should Mozilla Look For In an Automated Review System -- Mondrian's review comment system really seemed to encourage a style where there was a one-way flow of instructions from the reviewer to the reviewee: "Do this. Do this. Do this." and the reviewee replies with "Done. Done. Done." Sometimes this is appropriate, but oftentimes it isn't. (Mondrian is Google's internal tool for this) (via Marc Hedlund)
3. DOE Releases BP Oil Spill Data -- As part of the Obama Administration's ongoing commitment to transparency surrounding the response to the BP oil spill, the Department of Energy is providing online access to schematics, pressure tests, diagnostic results and other data about the malfunctioning blowout preventer. (via EllnMllr on Twitter)
4. The Rise of Crowd Science -- fascinating account of the life work of Alex Szalay, who has turned astronomy into a data-sharing discipline embracing crowdsourcing. I loved this story: More than 270,000 people have signed up to classify galaxies so far [on Galaxy Zoo]. One of them is Hanny van Arkel, a schoolteacher in Holland, who found out about the site after her favorite musician, Brian May, guitarist for the rock group Queen, wrote about it on his blog. After clicking around on Galaxy Zoo for a while one summer, she landed on an image with what she describes as a "very bright blue spot" on it. "I read the tutorial and there was nothing about a blue spot," she says, so she posted a note to the site's forums. "I was just really wondering, What is this?" Her curiosity paid off. Scientists now believe the spot is a highly unusual gas cloud that could help explain the life cycle of quasars. The Hubble telescope was recently pointed at the object, now nicknamed "Hanny's Voorwerp," the Dutch word for object. Astronomers have published papers about the discovery, listing Ms. van Arkel as a co-author. "Don't ask me to explain them to you, but I am a co-author of them," she says with a laugh. Szalay will be at Science Foo Camp this year, and I can't wait to meet him. (via Penny Carnaby)

Should the U.S. support Internet freedom through technology?

Perspectives on how the State Department could further Internet freedom.

The foreign policy priorities enumerated by the State Department, from Secretary of State Clinton to senior innovation advisor Alec J. Ross to case officers abroad, now include supporting Internet freedom around the world. As always with big ideas, the devil is in the details. "The issue for governments is that the same technology used for Internet freedom can be used for porn, copyright or terrorism," said Andrew McLaughlin, deputy chief technology officer at the White House, at Privacy Camp in Washington, D.C. this spring. Implementation of Net freedom is where the opinion of researchers, academics and public intellectuals diverge.

Earlier today, Radar featured the perspective of Ross on integrating technology into State Department operation, including its role in supporting Internet freedom policy. After the jump, find different perspectives on that policy, including specific ideas for which technologies it might make sense to fund.

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Technology for Internet freedom and innovation at the State Department

A look at the role and goals of the U.S. Secretary of State's innovation advisor.

What is a day in the life of the U.S. Secretary of State's senior advisor for innovation like? "Over-scheduled" would be under-billing the pace of his day.

When I met Alec J. Ross in the rare books collection of the State Department's library, he'd already been up since 5 AM to catch the early train in from Baltimore. Ross is one of a new class of entrepreneurial geeks that arrived in Washington with the new administration, moving from the frenetic pace of advising the Obama campaign to the long, echoing hallways of the State Department in Foggy Bottom. Ross is now applying the entrepreneurial drive and innovative approach that served him well at Teach for America, the Enterprise Foundation and One Economy, to addressing some of the State Department's greatest challenges, including Internet freedom, human trafficking and civic empowerment abroad.

For those that missed his keynote at the recent Gov 2.0 Expo, it's embedded below. After the jump, read more on Ross' role, his perspective on societal change through digital tools, and his strategy for leveraging technology to accomplish the State Department's goals.

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Don't get stuck in Edu 2010

A literal adoption of the National Education Technology Plan could undermine future tech use.

Business entered the computer age in the 1980s. Every department had at least one computer, often more. Laborious tasks such as collecting, tabulating, and representing data were completed in an instant by modern applications such as Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase III. We began to infuse the workplace with more and more computers, dazzled by the productivity gains we were about to realize. But dramatic gains never came from just automating our existing work processes; they materialized when we transformed the way we worked. When real-time information allowed us to virtually eliminate inventory through just-in-time delivery. When we learned to collaborate across time zones and geographies. When we began to become productive in "snippets of time" thanks to e-mail in our pockets. When real-time access to information and communication enabled teams to self-organize and take ownership rather than wait for instructions to flow down the low-bandwidth, noisy and lossy channels of hierarchical communication.

In many ways, education technology is today where business was thirty years ago. Almost no one questions the promise of always-available computing and broadband connections yet we are puzzled when infusing the schoolhouse with more and more computers doesn't always yield dramatic gains. As with business, education will see the radical impact when we move from automating existing processes to transforming the way we teach and learn. When real-time information on student progress will allow just-in-time delivery of the right lesson. When students become productive in "snippets of time" thanks to on-line learning tools in their pockets. When real-time access to information and communication enable students to collaborate, research, peer review, and mentor each other rather than only waiting for information to flow down the low-bandwidth, noisy, and lossy channel of one-size-fits-all lectures.

The National Education Technology Plan (pdf) gets to the heart of this, calling for "revolutionary transformation rather than evolutionary tinkering." The plan outlines models and specific recommendations for learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity. It offers the U.S. Department of Education a vivid sketch of education powered by technology and shaped by the learning sciences. A careful read reveals a deeply informed picture of teaching and learning that is both aspirational and achievable and that is grounded in the most current capabilities that technology has to offer.

But technology can offer more.

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Four short links: 8 June 2010

Neuroplasticity, Crime Landscapes, Math Help, and Visualization Tutorials

1. Neuroplasticity is a Dirty Word (MindHacks) -- quick roundup of some of the more important ways in which the brain changes. It's currently popular to solemnly declare that a particular experience must be taken seriously because it 'rewires the brain' despite the fact that everything we experience 'rewires the brain'. [...] Clearly this is rubbish and every time you hear anyone, scientist or journalist, refer to neuroplasticity, ask yourself what specifically they are talking about. If they don't specify or can't tell you, they are blowing hot air. In fact, if we banned the word, we would be no worse off.
2. If San Francisco Crime was Elevation -- elegant way to visualise the crime statistics from DataSF. (via BoingBoing)
3. Math Overflow -- a Stack Overflow type site for math questions. (via evilmadscientist)
4. A Protovis Primer -- tutorials for the Javascript visualisation toolkit. (via Flowing Data)

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